To implement informatization, an enterprise purchases an information technology (referred to as IT) infrastructure generally including three parts: a server device, a network device, and a storage device, and then the enterprise needs to set up a network by using the three parts and perform various configurations. A whole process is complex and a subsequent operation such as expansion is also complex. The maturity of a virtualization technology and the appearance of a cloud concept facilitate the emergence of an all-in-one machine. In order to reduce the complexity of network construction and subsequent IT device maintenance, main IT device providers (such as the IBM, DELL, HP, CISCO, and etc.) launch “all-in-one machine” products one after another, that is, a server, a storage device, and a network are pre-integrated in one rack. After purchasing this all-in-one machine, a customer does not need to perform complex hardware installation, and furthermore, does not need to perform complex software installation and configuration. After being powered on, an all-in-one machine (a schematic diagram of an architecture of a typical all-in-one machine is shown in FIG. 1) can be used after simple configuration (for example, external network IP configuration).
Two common objectives of various existing all-in-one machines are as follows: (1) reducing the cost, to ensure cost performance that is superior to that of a personal computer (referred to as PC); (2) optimizing the architecture, to ensure that the performance is not poorer than that of the PC. In order to achieve the two objectives, a key point is to efficiently use the storage device.
A storage device in the all-in-one machine generally uses a special storage device such as a storage area network (referred to as SAN) or a network attached storage (referred to as NAS). The special storage device such as the SAN or the NAS has been used as a separate device for a long time, but with the appearance of the cloud computing and an all-in-one machine, inherent disadvantages of the special storage device, such as the SAN or the NAS, used in the all-in-one machine are exposed: the special SAN or NAS requires complex configuration, and subsequent maintenance is difficult; the special SAN or NAS requires a control machine head, and therefore, the cost performance is not high and a low-cost requirement of a user cannot be satisfied; and the special SAN or NAS is controlled by a control machine head, and therefore, the horizontal expansion is limited and linear expansion cannot be implemented, so that a performance requirement of a query of lots of the data bursts cannot satisfied. Due to these disadvantages, a SAN or NAS device becomes a weak link in an all-in-one machine.